MUSCLE
2025, Single-channel video, colour, sound, 22’
Courtesy of the artist; Camden Art Centre, London; Fondazione In Between Art Film; the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago; Sadie Coles HQ, London
KARIMAH ASHADU
Karimah Ashadu (1985, United Kingdom) is a British-born Nigerian artist and film firector living and working between Hamburg and Lagos. Ashadu’s practice is concerned with labour, patriarchy and notions of independence pertaining to the socio-economic and socio-cultural context of Nigeria and its diaspora.
With no single protagonist or linear narrative, the film immerses us in a spectacle of strength through an intimate, amplified portrait of bodybuilders in the slums of Lagos. Inflated muscles, bulging veins and skin glistening with sweat fill the screen. Shot almost entirely in close-ups, the camera hovers near its subject with a weightlessness that intimates the feeling of soft breath on skin. Absent of a depth of field, figures blur and morph into abstracted forms, and bodies are layered within contained action, discipline and restriction. Karimah Ashadu’s measured pans across backs, chests and arms imbue the Black male body with a visibility, without rendering it singular or fixed. Our attention is drawn to embodiment, representation and the complexities therein. The metallic clang of barbells in what we discern as a make shift outdoor gym is punctuated with sounds of exertion and of the nearby street. Breath and muscle move in syncopated sonic choreography, and the men’s commitment to the ritual of maintaining the body is evident. At intervals, they drink sachets of ‘pure water’, framed with the precision of a commercial product placement that underscores their class-coded significance within capitalism. In patriarchal societies like Nigeria, the construction of masculine identity and its accompanying constraints necessitate performance, and the validation of an audience. As the men work to refine their bodies, we witness their desires imbricate and manifest in physical form, and gain insight into the immaterial realm of affect that resides in each of them. (Arese Uwuoruya)